What is the function of a landlord?
I have recently begun to classify the pseudo-profession of being a landlord, and its detrimental effect on first world society. This effort began because of my need to question the ethical value of someone who purchases land and uses the resultant property to charge people for shelter. I will attempt to clarify the vestigial properties of such a person, and attempt to provide a more elegant solution for the challenge of finding housing for people. While doing so may not have much more value than a need to question the status quo, I still feel that I have an obligation to my personal values and opinions on this matter.
First and foremost, I would like to establish the severity of the problem of housing and illuminate the critical importance of shelter. Housing in the United States is overlooked as an aspect of security that I believe government has an ethical mandate to fulfill. If it is the job of government to protect its people, then it has a vested interest in seeing that its people do not wander the streets and resort to vagrancy. The reduction of crime, the mitigation of infectious disease, and overall quality of life are all inexorably connected to the ability of people to find safe and comfortable housing. What monetary losses would be made in providing housing would be more than completely remedied by reduction of services rendered to people requiring assistance due to the previously mentioned connection.
The most caustic belief is that the creation of wealth is tied to the ownership of property and the investments made therein. By empowering private individuals with the agency to control the living conditions of others, the state has foregone its own ability to protect its people. While some people might be mistrustful of government to oversee housing projects of that magnitude, there is no reason to be more trusting of private induvial interests of landlords and rental agencies. Shifting trust from the friendly landlord to the friendly bureaucrat is an insipid detail to lay mistrust over. Landlords still need to operate within the red tape of government, and failing to do so now requires extra steps of reporting and correcting. With proper self-correcting mechanisms, people could place their trust in government to meet this basic and fundamental need. Simply because government would take the reins of housing, should not entitle its leadership to abuse surveillance or install undue hardship on its residents. Again, if you cannot trust government, why do you trust your landlord?
This does not mean that the government should own all housing, and that persons should not enjoy private property. This is just to say that housing should be made available for those who cannot or will not take property ownership into their own hands. The difference between this system and the current system is that there would be no individuals charging its people rental fees and making wealth from a fundamental need of people. Controlling or exerting dominion over property outside of the immediate need of living becomes oppressive and tyrannical on its face. The actual need or function of the landlord is questionable when considered.
What is a landlord but a person who oversees maintenance of a building and collects money for rent? At this point, a landlord is a foreman minus any sort of job training or qualifications. The landlord is merely making decisions based on whim, intuition, bias, misunderstanding, or by accusation. There is the ability of the landlord to be capacious, but most cases have demonstrated that the landlord is a profit seeking parasite. They contribute very little in the way of skill or labor to the very complex and multifaceted world of housing. It is just a “get rich slow” scheme, and such schemes rarely serve human benefit or interest. Maybe it suits people's romanticized notions about power and control without a background or experience to substantiate it. This type of Machiavellian nonsense I cannot abide by. Of course, there is the argument of the landlord to consider, but that can be shown to be questionable at best.
Unfortunately, landlord rhetoric usual lays blame on their tenants for the condition that buildings are left in. These complaints are usually the result of people feeling no obligation to property they have no stake or personal investment in. While I do not feel defacing or destroying things mindlessly to be a gain for society, it does justify a lack of concern for the property in question. The landlord would find it more morally appealing to find fault with those that they are charging for a life and death service then actually consider the value of their own station in life. The landlord is usually more willing to make absurd claims then actually return a security deposit, which is become less and less a deposit and more and more of just additional money to them. Paranoia should accompany treating people as mere means to an end.
There are also additional considerations when people are treated as mere means to an end. The main concern is that landlords become invested in the slave economy. The slave economy is the labor market that requires long and tiring labor without choice in service or its conclusion. The slave economy in modern terms is relegated to manual labor, retail work, low-wage clerical work, health and human services, and countless other employment options that require little or no education. When people are forced into labor and that labor barely pays for the most necessities, then it qualifies as slave labor. This was founded on concepts such as serfdom, peonage, sharecropping, and plantation slavery just to name a few. Simply because some currency changes hands, does not mean that the workers are not in bondage. This is to say nothing about how the world of credit and usury becomes intertwined into this monstrous leviathan.
The landlord does not want the slave to be free from bondage because that means that the slave would either have self-determination about living accommodations. Or worse for all, that the slave would break down, and the slave machine would cease to function. If that happened, stores would not be open, essential services would go unrendered, and basic amenities would become more like extravagant luxuries. This is where the corporate and private entities conspire to make things barely tolerable. Always hungry but never starving. This seems like a cumbersome way to live, and I would be pleased to see things change for the better. Does the landlord and rental agency want these things to change for the better? No. Not to get worse, lest their servants stop functioning. Ever the status quo.
The landlord uses fear of homelessness as a tool to perpetuate the slave economy, but some fail to play by their rules. There are many who do in a land that values liberty so highly, but in that land, homelessness is a serious epidemic. This is where institutions become bloated and overreaching as they corral those who buck the system. Yes, there are those who are dangerous and mentally imbalanced. These institutions are carrying far more people in need of housing than people who actually fit that description, however. Since the institution is removing people that refuse to pay their dues to the landlords from society, a great portion of the public loses respect for the intention of those institutions. Say nothing for often deplorable conditions of those institutions to begin with. The quality of those institutions would be increased if they weren’t devouring the destitute portion of the public. It is a social injustice that people are kept from housing, not a crime or insanity.
Given that there is demonstratable evidence to determine that the landlord is a corrupt profession (if you can call it that), there is no reason that it should be an ambition worth considering. No more than one should aspire to be a professional fraud artist or master of deceit. Anytime an unhealthy profession is venerated or even tolerated, the quality of life of a society is negatively affected. We should stride to take these concerns up with our leadership. The moratorium placed during the pandemic is the right direction for leadership to take, and I think it should take less than a virulent disease to facilitate that type of fundamental change.
What of the existing landlords, and their investments? Well, if they truly are concerned with housing and the wellbeing of those living there, they should turn their property over to government and allow themselves to be overseers that make decisions about what projects need to be undertaken on that land for the sake of its residents. That probably does not sound that appealing to many of the landlords, because it is not a do-nothing way to generate wealth. Much in the same way an investment banker tries to make money from money; such trivial positions should face an existential crisis. Perhaps those people with the skill to manage building projects would remain, and those who burden the world of housing would have to seek other means of making a living.
This may all seem a bit radical, but I believe that positive social change could be the result of steady and constant change in the direction of the world of housing. Given that I have had personal hardships in this area, it is a topic of close personal importance. Never forget that there is nothing harmful in trying to at least consider the importance of seeing the needs of people met for the sake of making the world a more pleasant place to live. It might not be easy, and some people may feel threatened, but I think it should not be done as punishment, but an end of injustice. If you are a landlord and read this, I sincerely hope you consider the moral implications of charging money for shelter and how hard it is to get one without the other.
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